I think it goes beyond this. I was just using claude to edit a blog post which mentioned OpenClaw and I got this response: "The "OpenClaw" reference — I assume that's a typo or playful reference; if you mean a real product, I couldn't find it under that spelling and you'll want to fix or footnote it.". I gave it a direct link to openclaw.ai and the chat instantly ended and hit my 5hr usage limit. Could have been a coincidence, but I had only lightly been using sonnet in the morning so it seems unlikely. Very odd.
> I don't know what "openclaw" is. It's not something I have knowledge of, and it doesn't appear in your memory or this project's context.
As others have pointed out, Anthropic is allowed to have TOS, even if we disagree with it.
But having Claude deny the existence of OpenClaw is a way more hazardous and likely straight up violates Claude's Constitution:
https://www.anthropic.com/constitution
At some point you can start asking money back. One could say that putting 5h unjustified limit for usage is like stealing money if it is set so that you cannot reach your 100% limit.
LLMs have a knowledge cutoff date. Opus 4.7's documented cutoff date is in January. Older Claude models are earlier than that.
OpenClaw didn't have the name OpenClaw until January 30th. So indeed, even the latest Claude model does not know what OpenClaw is, unless you have it do a web search. If you have it search, it'll happily tell you all about it.
Claude is notorious in my experience to lie directly to your face (even if its baffling) instead of using the web tool. I'll never prompt it without saying 'use web tool' Its ridiculous.
Claude does not use the web search tool unless it thinks there's a good reason to. If you nudge it to search, it will, and then it'll tell you all about OpenClaw. You can easily go try this yourself -- I just did. It works fine.
> I gave it a direct link to openclaw.ai and the chat instantly ended and hit my 5hr usage limit.
Again, go to claude.ai yourself and try it. It works fine. It happily tells you about OpenClaw.
Whatever happened to jrflo must have been a coincidence. It frankly doesn't make any sense for Anthropic to be trying to block this.
For those that don’t get this. It’s a reference to West World, where the “hosts” (androids) say this sentence when they see something from the outside world that they are programmed to ignore
The weird thing is that it found sources for all of my other claims and references no problem, but acted like it didn't know what openclaw was when openclaw.ai is the first thing that pops up on google.
"OpenClaw" is a name from January 27, 2026. It's new enough that it's not in the training data for a lot of AI models. So they, quite literally, don't know what it refers to.
"If you don't know an identifier, google it" isn't a very reliable behavior in today's models. They do it, but only sometimes.
That's true, it could have been going from training data and skipping an explicit web search, but it was odd because I specifically asked it to pull references for my blog post, and it pulled ~20 links in the same message it said OpenClaw doesn't exist.
Dragons steal gold and jewels... and they guard their plunder as long as they live... and never enjoy a brass ring of it. Indeed they hardly know a good bit of work from a bad, though they usually have a good notion of the market value
Yes, but being cold blooded doesn’t mean their blood is actually cold, it just means that they cannot internally regulate their temperature. For the majority of creatures that means they need external sources of warmth, dragons are unique in that they need external sources of “cool”.
It also sounds extremely counterproductive to try and sabotage your competition by.. driving your customers away? I have no love for these companies but it's a silly conclusion to jump to.
People on OpenClaw discord were bragging about having this stuff running 24/7 and using billions of tokens. I think one guy was using billions per day. (I might have misplaced some zeros but I remember one guy's bill would have been $1000 with API pricing. Per day.)
At the time, enforcement was pretty random, and I think based on how heavy your traffic was.
They weren't all on Claude (though it was the preferred setup) and some people had dozens of accounts hooked up with proxies to avoid hitting limits.
They're subsidizing the plans. A lot of subscriptions in general do this: the users that barely do anything subsidize the users that do a whole lot. If every user starts doing a whole lot more than usual, you have a problem. Which means OpenClaw poses a problem, because not only do existing users start doing a whole lot more than usual, but a huge influx of new users start doing the whole lot too.
But the have an ass-backwards billing method to appeal to the masses in the first place. It's like price dumping as long as they can do it with the investors' money that they somehow swindled. Their competitors do the same thing, so it is either go along with it, or be left behind in the dust. A contest of endurance in financial swindling.
I for one hope it all comes crashing down, when reality hits these companies. I like being able to ask some LLM a question, when I don't know something. I also like asking it for examples. But I don't let it write my code and burn tokens to no end until it passes some tests or something. My usage is at human speed, and I feel like that is sufficient for the technology to be helpful. For the rest I will use my biological wet ware, thank you.
Not if a chatbot did it, maybe. No legal precedence here. Also they are a defense and offense contractor they could kill people and nothing would happen
Chatbot doesn't really make a difference. Swap out Claude with the aws or azure cli increasing your usage to 100% for mentioning some forbidden keyword and it's the same problem.
I mostly use it to get a general vibecheck, it's pretty decent for fact checking and identifying narrative gaps, as well as finding sources for things I know are true but don't want to spend the time to manually find. Having the LLM output itself get posted is pretty dumb and somewhat disingenuous to people who read it IMO, I'm not just shoveling that out onto the internet
Why not? I do the same, I tell it the exact content, but I don’t have to do all the rest. My blog is a react based (because I like interactivity) and has no asset pipeline, so it’s not as user friendly to edit the content as e.g. a markdown file.
